Gymnastics is one of my favorite Olympic sports. It’s one that I can’t do, but I like to watch it because it is so beautiful. Both of my kids are in gymnastics, but they’re very low-level (my 4 year old was just promoted to the boy’s novice class, and my 8 year old is level 3). Even still, I love to watch the team gymnasts at our gym practice.

Gymnastics takes quite a bit of strength and balance… and years and years of training. You sometimes hear stories of runners taking up running in high school, but a good deal of the gymnasts that you see at the elite level have been practicing since they were little. It takes a lot of talent, but it also takes years and years of practice.

I think I like ladies’ gymnastics better, but they’re both awesome. There’s always some dramatic moments in the Olympics. You have to hope that your team doesn’t fall or make a fatal mistake, and hope that nobody gets injured.

Pictured here is a photo from the 1896 Athens Olympics. They did their gymnastics outside. That would be a pretty weird sight to see.

USA Gymnastics has just reported that Alicia Sacramone is trying to make a comeback into gymnastics at age 22. At age 20, she was one of the older (if not the oldest) competitor on the 2008 Beijing Olympic team.

Sacramone won the silver medal, along with the rest of her team in 2008 (although if He Kexin or any of the Chinese teammates are discovered to be underage, that may be upgraded to a gold in about a decade, like the 2000 team). Many of her teammates, including Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin, are also competing, but they were much younger when they competed in the Olympics.

She is doing the same beam routine that she did at the Olympics, and is now working on her floor exercises.

Her first challenge will be to make nationals. She has to do well at the 2010 Covergirl Classic, which will be held on July 24th. If she does well there, she can compete at the 2010 Visa Championships in August.

Sacramone didn’t do her best performance in Beijing, and it’s good to see her getting back into the game, especially at an older age. I wish her luck.

It’s time to dust off any Olympic history books that you might have, because history has changed. The U.S. team of Elise Ray, Amy Chow, Kristin Maloney, Dominique Dawes, Tasha Schwikert-Warren, and Jamie Dantzscher, who originally placed fourth at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, are now bronze medalists. Congratulations!

In 2000, China won the bronze medal. While some of the gymnasts looked young, they were able to prove that they were at least 16 and could participate. If you watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics, does this sound familiar?

In 2008, Dong Fangxiao applied to be an official at the Beijing Olympics. She turned in her paperwork to apply for the job, and guess what… she was not yet 24. Why would that be a problem? While people don’t have to be 24 to be an official at the Olympics, they do have to be 16 to participate in the gymnastic events at the Olympics. Dong was one of the bronze-medal winning gymnasts in 2000. If she wasn’t yet 24 in 2008, that means that she wasn’t yet 16 in 2000, and she wasn’t eligible to participate in those Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee can work very slowly. While they discovered this two years ago, they finally removed the bronze medal from the 2000 Chinese team today and awarded it to the United States, who placed fourth.

Dong Fangxiao did not win any other medals in the 2000 Olympics. She did place below the medal level in some of the other events; I’m assuming that in the official records, she will be disqualified in those events and other Olympians will be upgraded.

As far as the 2008 Olympics go, the IOC still accepts the passports of the gymnasts from that Olympics; however, a blogger did discover documents that showed that a couple of the gymnasts were underage. I personally believe that a couple of the passports were falsified. Should information come out that Chinese gymnasts were underage, those gymnasts would likely lose their medals as well.

Jaques Rogge says that he’s looking for age cheaters at the Youth Olympic Games. The first Youth Olympic Games will be held this summer in Singapore, and will be for ages 14-18. This is a good and noble goal, and I applaud him for it. However, he’ll need to do a better job than he has in the past.

Most of us who watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics may remember the Chinese gymnasts who looked like they were under age. They had “passports” that said that they were old enough to compete. However, one astute person was able to find documents using Google that said that He Kexin, who won gold on the women’s uneven bars, was 14 years old. He Kexin will be eligible to compete in this year’s Youth Olympic Games, but she will need to continue to lie about her age, or she could lose her medals from Beijing (she also won a team gold medal).

One of the Chinese gymnasts from Sydney, Dong Fangxiao, forgot about this. When she turned in paperwork to participate as an official in the Beijing Olympics… Surprise! Her Beijing paperwork says that she would have been 14 at the time of the 2000 Olympics. Yang Yun, another gymnast from 2000, is also suspected to have been underage. In a recent decision by the IOC, Dong Fangxiao has been confirmed to have been underage, and recommendations are now being made to remove her team medal, as well as those of the Chinese team. Once these recommendations are acted on, the US team from 2000 will move up into bronze-medal position.

Hopefully there will be no age cheating, but I’m doubtful. They also plan on looking for drug cheaters.

The next event on the Olympic calendar is the Youth Olympic Games in Singapore, this year. It’s less than six months away. I have no idea what to expect with these new Youth Olympics. The event is supposed to be a low-pressure event for the younger athletes, yet they hired Michael Phelps as an ambassador. I’m not sure how much publicity these games are likely to get. The Paralympic games, which will take place in a little less than two weeks, don’t get much publicity at all.

In 1924 in Chamonix, the first Olympic games wasn’t even called an Olympics. It was then known as “International Sports Week”, but was relabeled after the fact. It only had 16 events and 325 competitors from 16 countries. The recent Vancouver Olympics, in comparison, had 86 events and 2,629 athletes from 82 nations. What the Youth Olympics start out as may not be what they end up actually being.

So it should be interesting to see. Also, it will be interesting to see who does well at the first Youth Olympic games, if it is covered by the media. Many of the first Youth Olympic champions will be seen on the podiums in 2012, especially in fields like gymnastics, where younger athletes are favored. Then again, some athletes in events like gymnastics may reach the height of their careers before 2012.

While I do intend on including some coverage of the Paralympic games, the big focus for now will be on Singapore and London, the two upcoming games.